UNDERSTANDING AND IMPLEMENTING MANDATED REORGANIZATIONS 111 agenda/professional expectations of the remaining dean. Upon reflection, if the dean could turn back the clock, she would have strongly advocated that the president make a clear public justification of why this change would be helpful to the insti- tution’s faculty and/or students, as this would have helped smooth the transition to acceptance for faculty and even provided the president much desired political cover for making such a decision. Case: United we stand, divided will follow From its origin as a teachers college, an institution grew into an eclectic collection of eight colleges, five of which housed Arts and Sciences programs. Reflecting its origins, there were only program coordinators in the colleges and no department chairs, so each dean averaged 100 direct reports including staff and faculty. It was challenging to do anything but manage their reports. Given how busy the deans were with management functions, partnerships among the colleges were limited and faculty resisted change to the status quo. After several years in the job, the president announced to the university commu- nity the eight colleges would be merged into three, and departments would be created [Structural]. Department chairs would serve in limited term appointments so that no individual held power for too long and different faculty would have the opportunity to practice leadership roles [Political & Human Resource]. The president indicated this would be a cost-neutral reorganization, as savings from culling five deans’ offices would offset the costs of creating department chairs. The president appointed a task force to explore other possibilities for reorgani- zation, and the group recommended several different alternatives. Each alternative appeared to minimize the amount of reorganizational change. The president rejected the task force options and imposed the structure he first recommended: departments with term-limited chairs and three new colleges, one of those being a college of Arts and Sciences. The composition of departments in each college was also decided by the president. The new structure would be implemented in less than six months when the new fiscal year began. Most sitting deans resigned and departed the institution. The provost proposed to have the remaining dean of one of the five liberal arts colleges become the interim dean of the combined A&S college through the reorganization. Faculty expressed concern that the specific dean was an insider to the undesirable change process. The president and provost met with all A&S faculty to assuage their fears [Human Resource]. At the meeting, faculty advanced the name of a faculty member with some administrative experience to serve as interim dean of the combined college in place of the dean recommended by the provost. The provost accepted this recom- mendation and appointed her as interim dean. At the same time the reorganization was playing out, the president asked for the university faculty to create new tenure and promotion guidelines to align with the